[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Alternative syntaxes (was RE: Proposal Announcement)
There's a great prototype for "Adaptive Forms" at: http://www.isi.edu/~mm-proj/ The developers put together a Java program that takes a grammar for a "natural language-ish" statement, form, rule, query, etc. and provides a form-based interface that dynamically changes depending on the terms entered by the user. It seems like this would be a good way to enter information for some applications with complex DTDs. I suspect the grammar could be automatically generated (in many cases) directly from the DTD (or vice-versa?). In one of their papers, the authors briefly mention the Texas Instruments natural language shell from more than a decade ago that allowed users to frame complicated queries by selecting appropriate text fragments from a set of lists. This was an exceptionally powerful shell that never reached widespread popularity; perhaps this will be more successful. Ken Meltsner >From the first page: "Adaptive Forms is a tool for producing context-sensitive form-based interfaces. The system initially displays an overview of the main sections of a form, and an initial set of fields for the user to fill in. Depending on the values that the user enters, Adaptive Forms progressively adds new fields to the form. For example, a form for entering household information would show the user fields for entering the spouse's name only if the user had entered "married" in the "marital status" field. "The main design goal for Adaptive Forms is in entering structured information rapidly and without errors. One of our target applications was the specification of air campaign objectives, which are structured objects consisting of a verb (e.g., deny, gain), an aspect (e.g., what to deny or gain), an actor (e.g., country, a branch of armed forces), a location (e.g., a country or a region) and a time period. Each of the parts is itself a structured object whose substructure and possible values depend on the values specified for the other parts. For example, the aspects that can be gained are different from the aspects that can be denied, so the interface needs to compute the menus for the "aspect" field dynamically based on the fillers of other fields. Similar requirements arise in virtually any other application domain. " xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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